Finding Nirvana
by Regina Noctis
Summary: Being captured in Nevada and tested on like an alien from the Rift was not what Jack had in mind when he fled the ruins of Cardiff. But he'd never expected one of those scientists to help him get over the loss of Ianto, either. Post CoE.
1. Prologue

Disclaimer: *in a Monty Python God-voice* Let it be known that, for my first Torchwood fanfiction…I OWN NOTHING OF TORCHWOOD OR JACK HARKNESS. Unfortunately.

* * *

_LET down the bars, O Death!  
The tired flocks come in  
Whose bleating ceases to repeat,  
Whose wandering is done._

_Thine is the stillest night,  
Thine the securest fold;  
Too near thou art for seeking thee,  
Too tender to be told._

—_Emily Dickinson_

* * *

It had only been meant to be temporary, Jack told himself when things became unbearable. It was all in good faith, he'd meant to come back to Cardiff eventually, but he just needed some time to get away, as far as possible.

Away from, well, everything—the sights, the sounds, the _memories._ Yes, it was the memories that were threatening to devour him alive. It was the memories that caused the nightmares, which was why he'd ceased to sleep even the few hours that he normally survived on. It was the memories that dogged him both day and night, memories of Ianto Jones, whom he'd loved for all too short a time and loved far too little, Ianto's boyish face now calm and still in death.

Jack would often scream himself awake from his dreams of a dead Ianto. It wasn't that the thought of Ianto as a ghost scared him. He knew Ianto was far too sensible in life to return as a vengeful spirit in death. In fact, if he listened hard enough, Jack could almost hear Ianto scoffing at the very concept of the afterlife. No, it was the accusation and chilling hatred for causing his untimely death that Jack saw in Ianto's once-warm eyes, burning through Jack and searing his soul no matter where he hid in the barren landscape of his dream-world.

Sometimes, Ianto's face would haunt him in the real world as well. Whenever a dark-haired man in a business suit passed Jack on the street, he would double-take. Any Welsh-accented voice would freeze him, even if he were in the middle of crossing a roadway. (He'd narrowly avoided several car accidents in that fashion—not that it mattered, seeing as he couldn't bloody _die._) Jack spent his time away from Cardiff hoping against hope that Ianto Jones wasn't dead, even though Ianto (poor Ianto, he'd never deserved to die like that, with the dubious honor of being the first victim of the alien virus; Jack should have gotten him out of that warehouse sooner or never taken him in the first place) had breathed his last in Jack's arms, dark eyes pleading as he died for the first and only time.

_Don't forget me._ Those three simple words seemed to curse Jack Harkness, as he fled across continents and oceans away from the smoldering ruins of Torchwood Three, making him unable to forget Ianto Jones for even a healing moment.

Jack wasn't actually sure how far he'd intended to run in the first place. To Asia, but no, that wasn't nearly far enough. To Australia, but there were far too many Welsh there for Jack to live comfortably. To the Americas, perhaps, or even all the way to the ends of time and the universe if he could find a way to rejoin the Doctor—?

But in the end, it was decided (not by Jack) that he remain in the Americas for the foreseeable future. In North America, to be precise, smack in the middle of the Nevada desert, not terribly far from the radiated wasteland of Trinity.

It had all started out as a complete accident. Jack had been backpacking across the desert on foot, having taken a footpath that had bypassed all the signs warning against trespassing on government property. When a Hummer filled to the open-top roof with armed and camouflaged soldiers had roared up from behind, Jack had done the only sensible thing. He ran.

And they, of course, had shot him down when he refused to stop for them.

When Jack came to five minutes later, two soldiers were inspecting his body for secret weapons or spy devices. They were so shocked to see a formerly-dead man resurrect himself that they shot him again. And he again rose from the dead, only to be shot for the third time, this time with tranquilizers that would have knocked out a space whale the size of London.

When he finally regained his senses, still feeling incredibly hung-over from the drugs in his system, Jack found himself strapped down to a steel table in a dull white hospital room with a man in a white lab coat standing over him. Jack himself was naked from the waist up, and there was a window in one wall that provided a clear view of the proceedings for the crowd of people in lab coats one room over.

He had just opened his mouth to comment on how kinky the whole set-up was when a wooden gag was shoved down his throat. And then the burning, never-ending pain started. They had hooked him up to a generator and were sending an electric charge through him that was enough to power all of Torchwood Three for a year. It was a relief when his heart finally stopped, but the blissful blackness was quickly ended when another jolt of electricity pushed him to the right side of life again.

And so Jack fell into a morbid routine. Day after day (though he lacked any way of telling the time in the windowless cell they placed him in), the scientists of Los Alamos, for that was what he'd stumbled across, were using him as a test subject, experimenting with him to understand why he couldn't die. They'd kill him, getting more inventive as the days went by and they discovered that their new subject (Jack hadn't given them his name, even though they'd tortured him first to see if he really was an enemy agent, spying on their experiments. Not like he'd tell them, anyway, seeing as they couldn't threaten him with anything more than death, which was just an inconvenience for him. That was perhaps the only positive result out of being immortal: nothing really scared him anymore, unless it was the death of someone else, but Ianto was already long gone) was really and truly quite disposable, and then take samples of his cells to see how they had changed during the resurrection. And as Jack could have told them if they had just asked, there really wasn't anything to see. So they kept right on testing him, waiting for a result that would justify their tests after the fact. _Post hoc, ergo propter hoc._

Jack had gotten bored of this game after a while, which was when he had tried to escape. It had failed epically, resulting in two scientists dead in the counter-attack and Jack being starved to death in his cell as punishment. After that harrowing experience, Jack realized two things: that being forbidden to eat or drink for a week was perhaps the worst possible way to die or be tortured or both (never would he forget the taste of his own blood as he tore at his own body to quench his killing thirst), and that his body was indeed suffering adverse effects from these repeated, forced deaths. For the first time that he could remember, Jack fell ill—with a raging pneumonia that killed him three times before finally burning out of his system, leaving his body a shell of its former self. There would be no more daring escapes for Captain Jack Harkness: at least, not any time soon and most certainly not on his own.

The Nevada scientists had their own mini-Rift to deal with, which had been opened by the massive test explosions of the atomic bomb back in the Forties. As there was no such thing as Torchwood in the States, the stuff that passed through the Rift automatically became the playthings of Los Alamos. Jack sometimes saw other creatures, small aliens from other planets or sentient devices from the centuries of the future, being carried past him into neighboring cells. And sometimes, late in what Jack would come to consider the night, he'd hear tormented shrieks as the scientists upstairs did their job and experimented on their new finds, often killing the creatures in their haste, but sometimes sending them back to their cells and letting Jack be sung to sleep by the moans of those pitiful things next door.

It was in those times that Jack, weary and sick and injured from the outside in, contemplated the Asian concept of _karma_ and wondered if all those he'd killed before their time—his grandson, his lover, his coworkers, countless other beings that had fallen through the Rift and had never returned home—were getting their due by watching him suffer like this. Small comfort, that.

But in the darkest underground cell of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, it was the only comfort that Jack Harkness had left.


	2. Chapter I

CHAPTER I

Disclaimer: Jack Harkness belongs to Russell T. Davies. No, not in _that_ way. *facepalms*

* * *

YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY, the faded yellow sign a half-mile back had read. ALL ENTRANTS ARE SUBJECT TO A SEARCH OF BOTH VEHICLE AND PERSON. PLEASE SHOW YOUR PHOTO I.D. TO THE GUARD AT THE GATE.

The black Land Cruiser squealed to a halt in front of the small guard-station near the barbed-wire fence, kicking up a small cloud of yellow dust around its tires. A uniformed guard with a gold American eagle emblazoned on his cap came out of the station just as the dark-tinted window on the driver's side rolled down. A woman with dark auburn hair and tinted sunglasses handed over a sheaf of paperwork to the soldier before he could ask her for identification.

"Dr. Zoe Morgan?" The soldier glanced at the picture on the first page, then motioned for the woman to remove her glasses. She obliged, revealing almond eyes of a color that couldn't decide whether to stay pure green or blue.

"Sorry, I guess the picture didn't do me justice," she joked with a friendly grin. The soldier just gave her a cold look and continued rifling through her papers; the woman's grin faded, and she quickly pushed her sunglasses back on and faced forward in her seat, delicate fingers tapping nervously on the leather steering wheel.

After a few more minutes of perusal, the guard returned the paperwork to the woman inside the SUV. "Welcome to the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Dr. Morgan," he said, almost tonelessly. "I will notify the proper authorities of your arrival. Someone should be meeting you shortly. If you continue on the road and park in the first lot on your right, you won't miss the main building."

"Thank you, sir." Zoe Morgan nodded once before rolling up the windows and continuing her drive to her new place of employment. The staff so far didn't seem to be the friendliest, and Zoe only hoped that the military personnel were not the median sample of her coworkers' personalities. If her personal charm wasn't going to be enough to make her friends among her colleagues…well, her coffee-making skills had never failed her before (thank you, high school Starbucks), so why should they fail to break the ice now?

Zoe rolled down the windows again and let herself take in the barren desert scenery as she drove the rest of the way to the lab, the dusty air from outside shimmering as it struck the frigid atmosphere inside the car. Being in Nevada was still a huge shock to her, even so many days after receiving the letter that all but finalized her position at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. For her, a freshly-graduated alumna of Princeton with a doctorate in genetics and student loans worth twice her parents' mortgage, the job was a godsend.

Not that she had terribly high expectations of her line of work once she got there. Sure, the contract had made it sound very fantastical indeed—"study of non-terrestrial, possibly extra-terrestrial life-forms at the molecular level," who _were_ they kidding anyway; but Zoe had had enough experience in the research labs of her graduate years to know that the new ones in the office, no matter what field, always got stuck with the crap jobs first: errand running and cleaning house, that sort of thing. Especially the latter, considering that most of the scientists (herself included) would be living on site for most of the year…

Zoe's hands clenched into fists on the steering wheel. She had a feeling that she'd be thanking every deity for packing a half-dozen boxes of nitrile gloves. Even for a biology major, Zoe had a rather unhealthy obsession with hygiene.

Her thoughts were cut off there when she realized that she had just missed the entrance for the parking lot. The SUV's tires shrieked in protest as Zoe executed a perfect three-point turn at city highway speeds and then sped back to the lot, leaving a two-foot haze of desert dust in her wake.

* * *

The guard was as good as his word. When Zoe entered the glass doors of the main building, with a suitcase in each hand and a bulging backpack on her shoulders, there was someone already waiting for her.

"Dr. Morgan. Welcome to Nevada." The slightly balding, bug-eyed man stood from his seat on a bench just inside the doorway and waited for Zoe to set down one of her suitcases before shaking her free hand. "I'm Robert Phillips, assistant director of the biology section of the lab. You'll be working under me until you get your tenure, if you choose to do so."

"Thank you, sir. A pleasure to meet you." Zoe wiped a few drops of sweat from her forehead, already thinking longingly of the cool Atlantic air of Manhattan, where she had been staying before getting her letter from Los Alamos. "Oh, no, I've got that, thanks," she quickly said, stopping Dr. Phillips from picking up her suitcase. "Sorry. Delicate equipment inside, you see."

"Ah." Zoe could almost see Phillips' cogs whirring behind his eyes, trying to determine what microscope or calibrator she might be hiding in her luggage. "No need to worry, we have all the equipment you'd ever need in the lab…"

"Probably not what I have, though." Zoe grinned as she hefted the suitcase off the ground. "In here is my entire coffee workshop, complete with grinder and two months' worth of beans. Can never be too prepared, if you know what I mean, sir. This darling's saved me many times in college _and _grad school."

Phillips cracked a small smile, which looked unnatural on his pudgy face. It was almost disturbing enough to be called a leer. "Ah, _that_ kind of equipment. Not many around here with your talent, unfortunately. But don't let me stop you." He gestured to a corridor extending to his left. "This will take you to our living quarters. Your room is on the third floor, room three-twenty-three. Once you've set everything down, washed up a bit, I can take you to the mess hall and show you around from there after dinner. Shall I meet you back here in, say, half an hour?"

"Yes, sir. See you then." Zoe raised and lowered her shoulder in farewell as she clomped her way down the hall, using her elbow to push the UP button for the elevator at the end of the corridor. _Nice enough man, Phillips,_ Zoe mused as she entered the waiting elevator and rode her way to the third floor. _Smile gives me the creeps, though. And he kept trying to look down my blouse, I hope he's not one of __those__ types… _Just as the elevator chimed for the third floor, Zoe recalled that the man had been wearing a gold band on his left ring finger. _Well, then. Here's to hoping that he won't suddenly find marital infidelity attractive—_

"Oh! You must be Zoe Morgan!"

Zoe had just stepped out of the elevator when she found herself staring at a tall, heavily made-up, blonde woman with bright blue eyes and a vapid look, her muscles bulging beneath her slightly-too-small lab coat. Anywhere else, and Zoe would have placed her in the category of "dumb blonde with a fondness for the gym." But this was Los Alamos, and Zoe knew the government wouldn't allow people without intelligence into the laboratory…

"I'm Kathy Pearson, organic chemistry intern and your roommate!" Zoe gasped for air as Kathy practically buried Zoe in a massive bear-hug. "We're going to have _sooo_ much fun together!" Kathy squealed into Zoe's ear.

All right, so perhaps the government's I.Q. test wasn't as stringent as Zoe had hoped.

"Kathy! Air! Would be nice!" Zoe managed. Kathy released her reluctantly, and Zoe massaged her neck after setting the heavier of two suitcases down. "Sorry, but if we're going to be living together, can we just—keep a bit of personal space?" Zoe asked faintly.

"Yeah, no problem! Sorry, I just tend to get carried away when I meet new people. Ooh, let me carry that—" Before Zoe could stop her, Kathy grabbed the suitcase on the floor and made off with it down the hall. "Our place's a bit of a walk, but at least it's roomy! Built for three, you know, but some Harvard chick turned down the job and went to FermiLab instead! Silly, I think, but physicists are just weird like that…"

Zoe, still trying to get over the fact that Kathy had just referred to a Harvard physics graduate as "some chick," could already feel the coming of a migraine as her new roommate shrilly prattled on ahead of her.

It was looking to be a long and trying next few months, indeed.

* * *

"Nowhere in my contract did it say that I'd be sharing a room with an intern who likes to, and I quote, _party long and party hard,_" were the first words that Zoe said to Phillips when she met up with him in the lobby exactly thirty minutes later.

The man just chuckled, much to Zoe's annoyance. "Oh, you've met Kathy, have you?" he said. "Yes, she's a bit of a rambunctious spirit. It's a good thing that the Army's ban of alcoholic beverage doesn't apply to the lab, or we'd have had to kick the dear girl out months ago. But she's quite the miracle with spectroscope, you'd be surprised."

"You bet I would be," Zoe muttered, then raised her voice to change the subject. "How is the food around here?"

"We use the same kitchen and mess hall as the soldiers who guard us—it saves money that way, you see. We'll be there in a moment. All things considered, it's not terribly bad, I suppose." Phillips was leading Zoe through the ground floor of the dormitory side of the laboratory building. "If you take the elevator to the basement level, you'll be able to access the laundry room and showers. There are shared washrooms on every floor, two men's and two women's. Unfortunately, our budget's been slashed recently, which means that the residents have to take care of their own housekeeping…" Phillips cast a helpless look at Zoe and shrugged his shoulders.

Zoe groaned inwardly. She _knew_ she would be thankful for those gloves at some point.

As they reached the entrance of the mess hall, already abuzz with the dinner crowd of scientists, Phillips paused and turned to Zoe. "You say you're good with coffee? How about without your machine? Or your beans?"

"Why, um, yes, I'm good with coffee, I guess, sir." Zoe was startled by the abrupt questioning. "I'm also…very resourceful, shall we say. I can make do. Why?"

Phillips smiled/leered again. "The coffee machine is up against the far wall in the beverages section. I like mine black, but not bitter, if you get my drift. I'll get food for two and meet you when you're finished." With that, Phillips turned and marched off to the trays, leaving Zoe like a beached fish in the doorway to the mess hall, standing out against all the white lab coats in her dark jeans and black crew-neck.

Zoe had never been one to give up before she started. So she walked over to the drink machines and warily eyed the coffee machine before her. It was crusted with old grounds and smelled _nothing _like coffee. Grabbing an empty mug, Zoe poured herself a half-cup and tasted it gingerly.

She gagged at the bitter concoction that left a dark black stain in her cup. _What a disgrace to the name of coffee!_ There was no time to lose. Zoe set the mug down on the counter and, with a new purpose to her movements, lugged the coffee machine to the back of the kitchen. She ignored the stares of the kitchen staff around her, instead demanding to know _where_ in the name of all that was good and holy did they keep the coffee supplies.

Phillips was waiting with her food twenty minutes later when Zoe found him at an empty table in a corner of the mess hall. "Here you go, sir." She handed him one of the two mugs she was holding; both were filled near to the brim with steaming dark-brown coffee, but his was a shade darker than hers. "Black but not bitter, just as you asked for."

Phillips took one sniff before gulping down the hot liquid greedily. "That's it," he said hoarsely. "I'm recommending you for tenure tomorrow morning. Anyone who can make the motor oil they usually serve us taste _this_ good deserves it."

Zoe beamed and sat down across from Phillips, in front of her own tray. "Just doing my job, sir," she said modestly and daintily sipped from her mug.

* * *

The rest of the evening was a bit of a blur for Zoe. After they finished dinner, Phillips had promptly escorted her to his domain, the graveyard-shift lab on the second floor of the main building and introduced her to the eleven other scientists, technicians, and interns working there. Zoe was hard-pressed to keep every name associated with the correct face as they all crowded around her, offering hands to shake or slapping her on the back in the friendliest possible way.

And once Phillips had her demonstrate her coffee-making prowess in the break room, Zoe was practically mobbed in the rowdiest group hug she'd had since middle school.

Once everyone had had their chance to meet the newest member of the lab, Phillips sent everyone back to work—except for one technician, whom he waved aside with a magnanimous gesture. "You, Llewellyn," he called. "Leave what you're doing for now. Dr. Morgan here could use a better tour guide than me for a bit, if you would."

"Yes, sir!" The young man, dark hair tousled and denim overalls stained greasy black with mechanic's oil, practically skipped over to his boss. He quickly wiped off his hands on his overalls before shaking Zoe's hand again. "I'm Kevin Llewellyn, lab tech. Good to meet you, Dr. Morgan."

"Call me Zoe, please," Zoe said with a warm smile. She had immediately taken a liking to Kevin's lively and pleasant demeanor. "Llewellyn, you said? You're Welsh?"

"Yes, full-blooded Welsh, that's right." Phillips coughed and discreetly excused himself, exiting the lab quietly. "You must be, as well?"

"No, just half, on my mother's side. But enough that it counts, I guess." Zoe glanced around at the rest of her coworkers, most of them bent over their microscopes, but all of them peering at her from the corners of their eyes. "So. You're my guide. What am I supposed to see, exactly?"

"Well, I guess Dr. Phillips wanted you to here the story of the lab from someone else. Maybe he thought you'd believe it better from me, I dunno." Kevin shrugged. "At least, he had me learn about it from Maggie—she doesn't work here any more, but she was the lab techie from day-shift."

Zoe quirked an eyebrow at Kevin in her best possible look of disbelief. "Learn about what?"

Kevin smirked back. "Why, about aliens, of course. That's what we study here. And that's going to be your job—studying aliens and their gene structure. Wasn't it in your contract?"

Zoe stared at Kevin in mixed shock and horror. "You're telling me that the clause about 'extra-terrestrial life-forms' wasn't some kind of joke?!"

"I know, that's what I thought, too," piped up a petite red-head working two microscopes over. "Kevin, why don't you show her the Highlander? I know that convinced _me_ when I started working here…"

"Great idea, Laurel." Kevin clapped a stunned and sputtering Zoe on the shoulder and led her out of the lab into the corridor. "She's right, you know. The Highlander will convince you of pretty much anything, really. If you'll follow me, the experimentation room's on the first floor—"

"'The Highlander'?" Zoe had a bit of difficulty keeping up with the gangly, long-legged Kevin as she was still too bemused to think properly. "Who is—what—why do you call him that?"

Kevin offered her a teasing grin. "You'll see what we mean in a few minutes. Trust me."

* * *

The experimentation room was set up much like a police interrogation room, Zoe thought as she peered inside through the observation window. Whitewashed walls and white tiled floor, some spots a darker brown shade than others (Zoe didn't want to know why, and she didn't ask); fluorescent lighting that cast a harsh white glare about the room; and a single steel chair in the middle of the otherwise-empty floor.

Kevin hung up the black inter-office phone behind Zoe with a loud clatter. "I've called them up. Guards should be bringing him soon."

Zoe waited for the silence to grow before turning away from the window to face Kevin accusingly. "You—how can you be taking this so calmly?" she asked, jabbing her finger first at Kevin, then pointing above and around her as she continued to rant in a half-hysterical tone. "A top-secret government lab, working with aliens and god-knows-what-all, and you're just standing there telling me this like—like—this is perfectly and sanely _normal!_"

"Sorry, Zoe, but that's Los Alamos for you. You'll get used to it. Eventually." Zoe shot him an evil glare. "No, really, it just takes a little time, that's all. I had to learn how to work with computers that were built for creatures with twelve fingers on each hand, for crying out loud! Of _course_ I know this isn't normal, but it's my _job,_ you see? I have to treat it like it's normal, or else I'm going to go nuts. Right, there he is, they're bringing him in right now."

Zoe whirled around in time to see two armed soldiers in full camouflage half-dragging, half-shoving a male prisoner in a faded orange jumpsuit into the experimentation room. He was tall, much taller than either Zoe or the lanky Kevin, and extremely thin; his bony wrists and ankles jutted out from the tattered ends of his suit. His face was gaunt and haggard, with haunted blue eyes staring blankly beneath a matted brown fringe; but he was clean-shaven and nonetheless handsome in a very young, pitiable way. Zoe felt a twinge of feeling as the prisoner was easily forced down into the chair and handcuffed in place by the guards before they left the room, locking the door behind them.

"Kevin. What are you going to do with him?" Zoe murmured, her eyes never leaving the face of the man in the jumpsuit. To her surprise, when he slowly raised his head, his eyes met hers unflinchingly through the glass. "Wait, can he see me?"

"Hm? Oh, yeah, the glass is two-way." Kevin had bent over an array of buttons and levers on the far side of the observation room, his back to Zoe.

"Whose bright idea was that?" As Zoe continued to stare at the man in the chair, and as he continued to stare back, she thought she could recognize some of the emotions that flitted across his face. Anger. Despair. Hunger (whether for food or for something else, Zoe couldn't say). And worst of all, resignation for whatever was to come. "Kevin, _what in God's name are you doing?_"

Before Kevin could respond, the man in the chair began to laugh—a dry, rasping chuckle that could be heard through the pair of speakers on either side of Kevin's console.

"_Hey there, good-looking,_" the man said to Zoe in a gasping hoarse baritone, his eyes still boring into hers. "_You're a new one, aren't you? I know you can hear me. How's this place treating you so far? Don't expect to last long, I've seen prettier girls than you fade out in a few days—_"

"Oh, shut _up,_" muttered Kevin as he flipped a switch, hard. "What am I going to do with him, Zoe? Watch."

And with that, Kevin pressed a green button and flipped two more switches.

Zoe heard a faint hissing sound coming through the speakers; at the same time, a cloud of yellow opaque gas slowly descended from the ceiling, surrounding the prisoner's head within a few seconds. As he took his first breath of the gas, he suddenly started coughing. The sound was horrible, doubly amplified and made more harsh by the speakers, but the sight was even worse as he twisted and spat out a large mouthful of blood onto the floor beside his chair.

Zoe's hands had flown to her mouth, which was open in an expression of pure horror. "Kevin! You're killing him!" she cried, unable to tear her eyes away as the man began to convulse, still coughing up blood and struggling against the handcuffs in the obviously bolted-down chair. "Stop it, stop it right now!"

"Chlorine gas. Invented by Fritz Haber and first used in World War I. Lethal from long exposure, but you only need a simple gas mask to protect yourself." Kevin spoke casually, lecturing Zoe as if she wasn't horrified beyond belief, as if another man wasn't dying a painful death in the room just beyond the partitioning glass. "As he inhales the chlorine, it reacts with the air and water in his lungs to create hydrochloric acid that eats away at the lung tissue, hence all the blood."

"Kevin! You can't seriously be killing him just to show me—oh my God." The man strained to raise his head, gazing at Zoe one last time before collapsing back in the chair, limp as a rag doll. His chest fell once more, then remained still. "Oh my God, oh my _God—_"

Zoe whimpered, pressing her hands to her mouth to muffle the sound as tears sprung to her eyes, blurring her vision. _He's dead,_ her brain screamed, _and it's your fault! You were watching, you let it go on…_ She tried to turn away from the sight of the prisoner's dead body, but Kevin's firm hand on her shoulder kept her facing forward.

"No, Zoe. Keep looking." Kevin was staring at the scene himself, with a morbid fascination that made Zoe feel sick. "The best part hasn't come yet."

Zoe bit back a tearful retort and did as instructed, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. She was fairly sure that her vision was no longer compromised, but she couldn't be quite as sure a few minutes later.

That was when the man suddenly opened his eyes and took a gasping breath of air, which turned into another coughing fit as he inhaled the rest of the chlorine gas in the room.

Zoe screamed and backed away from the glass, bumping into the console on the other side of the observation room. Her blue-green eyes were now wide with fear. "Kevin, is this some sort of sick joke?!" she demanded. "He never died, he's _alive,_ what the hell is going on here—"

"Do you see now why we call him 'the Highlander'?" Kevin moved in front of Zoe, partially blocking her view as the man began to cough up fresh blood once more. "He can't die, Zoe. We've killed that—alien hundreds of times, and he always resurrects himself. Always." Kevin shook his head. "You think _this _is bad—when Maggie showed him to me, she had him burned alive. I had to watch him re-form inside out from a pile of bones and ashes." He shuddered at the memory.

But Zoe wasn't watching or listening to Kevin any longer. She was looking at the man in the chair, who was dying again in the other room. "No. I—don't believe it," she said, trying in vain to convince herself by saying the words out loud. "I can't, Kevin. How could someone—or something—be that way? It's not scientifically possible…"

Kevin shrugged nonchalantly and reached behind Zoe to press a red button on the console. A buzzing noise sounded over the speakers, and the guards burst into the experimentation room (this time sporting gas-masks), immediately uncuffing the dead/unconscious man and dragging him out of the room. "Look, Zoe, I don't know the answer to that. It's not my department, I'm just the computer guy. But you, on the other hand…"

Without warning, Kevin snaked his arm around Zoe's shoulders and guided her out of the observation room. "That's _your_ job," he said in earnest. "Phillips and the other heads of the lab have been trying to figure out why this guy can't die for months already. They've already ruled out chemicals and body structure and everything—but we haven't had a geneticist here before, so there's still the DNA option open, you see?"

"Yes, I see. I see very well." Zoe broke free of Kevin's restraining arm and whirled around to face him from the front, her face set with hard determination. "Tell me, where do you keep him between these—_experiments_?" She spat out the word like it hurt to hold it in her mouth.

"In the basement of the main lab building, where we keep the rest of the alien stuff we find." Kevin gave Zoe an odd look. "Why do you ask?"

"Because." Zoe shot him a glare and spun on her heels. "I owe him an apology for making him my welcoming entertainment!" she called over her shoulder as she jogged around the bend of the hallway and out of sight, leaving Kevin to stare at her retreating back with a gobsmacked expression on his face.

* * *

It was surprisingly cold in the basement of the laboratory where the "aliens" were kept.

Zoe shivered as she wandered through the dingy hallway, lined on either side with cell after barren cell, most containing some strange creature or foreign piece of machinery while the rest lay empty. By the time she'd seen the sign on the inner door proclaiming that CELL TEMPERATURE MUST REMAIN AT 5˚C, it was too late to go back and get a jacket from her room (if she'd even had the foresight to pack one before leaving home for sweltering Nevada).

Besides, Zoe couldn't tell how much of her shivering could be attributed to the temperature or to her sheer horror at what she saw around her.

It was much like Zoe would have imagined walking through Guantanamo might have felt. The filthy conditions of the cells, the despair of the prisoners tangible in the air, the roiling stench of fear and sweat and blood that hung rank in the air—Zoe wasn't sure if she was going to faint or retch or both in sequence.

The condition of the prisoners themselves was bad enough. None were humanoid as far as Zoe could see, but they all certainly showed the same agonies of living in squalid conditions as any other human would. Many of those with skin suffered from lesions of blistering boils that shone a raw red under the dim lights of the prison. There was one creature, a hideous coil of massed tentacles writhing within a small nucleus and expanding outwards like Medusa's hair, that had been strung up to the walls with chains and manacles; one of its many arms/legs snaked out through the bars of its cell as Zoe passed by, trying to grab at her arm as she backed away in revulsion.

And all of them, despite the fact that some did not have a mouth that Zoe could see, moaned and keened lowly as Zoe walked through this living hell, trying to ignore the terrible sight around her and reach her destination in relatively one emotional piece.

Finally, in the second-to-last cell on the left, sandwiched between what looked like a rusty teakettle the size of a man and a blob of black oil that quivered like Jello on the floor, was the man Zoe had watched die twice upstairs not fifteen minutes earlier. He was slumped against the side wall of his cell while leaning up against the bars, his face pressing hard on the cold metal. His eyes were closed, and his uneven breathing did not change as Zoe slowly approached his cell; every so often a shiver ran through his body, but otherwise he did not acknowledge her presence. She figured he was asleep, but was proven wrong when he suddenly spoke up, not bothering to open his eyes as he did so.

"What do you want." It was not a question, but rather a tired repetition of words which he seemed to expect no would ever answer. Zoe hesitated, then dropped to her knees and sidled closer to the cell door until she was at the same level of the man's face and not half a foot away.

"Look, I'm—I came to apologize." Zoe had dropped her gaze to her hands clenched in her lap, thus missing it when the man suddenly opened his eyes, face twisted with surprise. "I didn't mean—I never wanted to see you get killed up there. I'm sorry. Really, I am."

Zoe looked up when the man began to laugh. The sound was just as harsh and ragged as it had been over the speakers in the observation room. "Don't you worry, miss," he said lightly, but with an undercurrent of condescension in his voice. "There's nothing like a little chlorine to freshen up your day. You should give it a try sometime."

Zoe scowled, her hands unconsciously twisting at the denim of her jeans. Even in his condition, he was laughing at _her!_ "If there's anything I can do for you," she continued uneasily, determined to remain cordial if at all possible.

But he cut her off abruptly. "Look, you want to do something for me?" He paused, glaring at Zoe with the anger now outright flashing in his blue eyes. "You could go away and _leave me the fuck alone._"

Before Zoe could formulate a response, the man suddenly pushed himself away from the bars and curled in on himself, coughing so violently that she could see his bony shoulders jerk with every spasm beneath the thin fabric of his jumpsuit. The fit passed a minute later; and when he sat up straight again, a trickle of blood streaked from his lips down to his chin, no doubt an aftereffect of his repeated gassing death.

"Oh God." Zoe blanched, but quickly recovered. "Here—" She fished into her jeans pocket and soon extracted a faded pink cotton handkerchief. The man was openly staring at her with confusion written on his face; Zoe took advantage of his distraction to grab his wrist through the bars (so thin, so fragile, Zoe could have easily snapped the bones in it like twigs!), holding him in place while gently wiping away the blood from his face, much as Zoe's own mother had wiped the dirt away from Zoe's face when the young tomboy had spent the afternoon romping in the garden.

Their eyes met again. This time, his fierce blue gaze was somewhat softer, less contemptible. Zoe offered the man a faint smile, a tentative peace offering, as she crumpled the bloody handkerchief in her fist.

"My name is Zoe." She gave his wrist a light squeeze. "What about you?"

The man hesitated before taking a deep, shaky breath. Only the echo of his whispered reply reached Zoe across the barred door that separated them.

"Call me…call me Jack."


End file.
